Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  Bloom’s rage had been born from a 1969 confrontation between the university and Third World student activists, in a moment that may have been as crucial to Bloom’s intellectual formation as his studies with the influential conservative philosopher Leo Strauss. In April of that year, Bloom was a young assistant professor at Cornell University. At that point, a multi-year administrative effort to recruit Black students to this Ivy League school had created strong pockets of white resistance. On Parents’ Weekend, a spring ritual especially beloved by alumni and their legacy admits, the antagonisms between Black students and those who opposed their presence on campus exploded.

  After midnight on Friday the residents of a Black women’s student co-op awoke to find a cross burning on their lawn. This precipitating event never made it into Bloom’s recountings. Instead, he would begin by noting what happened next: at dawn a group of Black students marched to Willard Straight Hall and began occupying it. They said they wanted to call attention to the administration’s ineffectuality at dealing with racism. They demanded the immediate establishment of an Africana Studies program.

  Hours later, a white fraternity stormed the building trying to rout the occupiers. Fights broke out and the frat was repelled. Soon progressive white activists set up a support cordon around Straight Hall. But, unsatisfied and anxious, some of the occupiers decided to arm themselves. Police were called from neighboring counties, assembling down the hill in downtown Ithaca. Tense negotiations with the administration ensued. One police officer recalled thinking that a shootout “could have made Kent State and Jackson State look like the teddy bear’s picnic.”44

  But in the end, university officials agreed to accelerate the development of an Africana center and to begin an Africana Studies program. Almost two days after the cross burning, the students left Straight Hall victoriously, some brandishing rifles and bandoliers. Photos were snapped, and headlines were written: “Universities Under the Gun.” Bloom was enraged that the university administration and his faculty colleagues had capitulated to Negroes With Guns. He soon chose to leave Cornell.

  Two decades later conservative scholars felt that things had become even worse. In 1988, a strong majority of Stanford’s faculty Academic Council passed the expansive Culture, Ideas, and Values proposal to replace the Western Cultures graduation requirement. Faculty passage of similar requirements at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison followed shortly. Diversity proposals around admissions and curricular reform were being taken up across the country.

  Until that moment cult-cons had difficulty articulating their anger at the ways the world was changing around them. They often derided the multiculturalists as “academic Marxists.” The term was wildly inaccurate—this motley bunch included post-Marxists, anti-Marxists, and the ideologically nonaligned. But now Bloom’s book, the students’ vulgar chant, and the spread of diversity requirements had given cult-cons the language for the backlash.

  In November 1988, a group of three hundred met in New York City to form the National Association of Scholars. In the name of objectivity, scholarship, and merit, they called for a restoration of great Western tradition, vowing to confront affirmative action, diversity trainings, “tenured radicals,” and their “oppression studies.” “The barbarians are in our midst,” thundered Penn history professor Alan C. Kors in his keynote. “We need to fight them a good long time. Show them you are not afraid, they crumble.”45

  THE FAITHLESS

  Pat Buchanan captured the spirit of the growing backlash. He decried the “across-the-board assault on our Anglo-American heritage.” He said, “The combined forces of open immigration and multiculturalism constitute a mortal threat to American Civilization.”46 To him, faith in Euro-American ideals was the basis of culture, which in turn was the very foundation upon which civilization rested. “When the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die,” Buchanan wrote. “That is the progression.”47

  But traditionalists did not come from only the right. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—the Kennedy advisor, a supporter of civil rights and immigration reform, and a historian whose interest in the study of slavery had once marked him as a radical—said in a speech:

  The ideologues of multiculturalism would reject the historic American purposes of assimilation and integration. They would have our educational system reinforce, promote and perpetuate separate ethnic communities and do so at the expense of the idea of a common culture and a common national identity.48

  In his sculpting of Kennedy’s cultural policy, Schlesinger had redefined American nationalism. But his position on multiculturalism seemed to reveal a faith in his country that was both strikingly fragile and narrow. There could be no room for integration that was not assimilation, no concession that cultural change might or should move in more than one direction at once.

  New York Times writer Richard Bernstein—returning from a frontline posting to Berkeley—wrote, “The plain and inescapable fact is that the derived Western European culture of American life produced the highest degree of prosperity in the conditions of the greatest freedom ever known on the planet Earth.”49 In challenging the standards that made America great, he wrote, multiculturalism “sanctions a cultivation of aggrievement, a constant claim of victimization, an excessive, fussy, self-pitying sort of wariness that induces others to spout pieties.”50

  In this, the white liberal establishment agreed with the right. To them, the civil rights movement had established integration’s natural limit—you’ve won the right to try to be us. But now, everywhere, all those Others—the charter school teachers, corporate consultants, state college professors, urban school board members, first-generation college students, Afrocentrists, Ebonicists, and “reverse racists”—were, in their refusal of that aspiration, balkanizing America.

  Bernstein compared multiculturalism to the moment the French Revolution turned from “the enlightened universalism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen into the rule of the Committee of Public Safety and the Terror.”51 Multiculturalism, he wrote, was “nobility perverted.”52

  But a dollop of intellectual honesty required anyone to admit the persistence of racial discrimination and cultural inequity. Here was a new, particularly vexing kind of First World intellectual problem: if one just came out and said he was against inclusion, opportunity, and diversity, people might think he was a racist asshole. Bernstein admitted, “Nobody wants to appear to be against multiculturalism.”53 And this is how the word “multiculturalism” came to be associated with two weirder words designed both to evade and shut down debate—”identity politics” and “political correctness.”

  Charging someone with “identity politics” meant: there’s all these problems in the world, like, say, the hole in the ozone layer, and all you want to talk about is your own little oppression. It meant that “race” was never about being white, “gender” was never about being male, and “sexuality” was never about being straight. Those were your problems. Whiteness was just the flavor the diverse frogs in the pot were melting toward. “Identity politics,” as Kwame Anthony Appiah once quipped, “is what other people do.”54

  Charging someone with “political correctness” was like putting on white-guilt deodorant—smells like freedom of expression! If cultural openness was really the emerging orthodoxy, then bigotry could be a form of good old American contrariness, a necessary national self-corrective. But also, calling someone else PC meant never having apologize for being a racist. It was a phrase with as much power to end a conversation as the word “racist”; the restorationist’s trump card.

  All these new misdirections felt, well, hypersensitive. And these debates were really about what the novelist Paul Beatty would call in his perceptive novel, The White-Boy Shuffle, with equal parts sarcasm and sentiment, “the eternal war for civility.”

  What was the right place for people of color? “All of us appreciate a diversity of restaurants and food,” Pat Buchanan wrote, “French, Chine
se, Japanese, Italian, Mexican, Serb, Thai, and Greek, for example.”55 In response, multiculturalists could summon a line from Malcolm X: “I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner.”56

  A CRISIS OF IDENTITY

  Multiculturalism, Richard Bernstein wrote, had sown “considerable confusion about who, exactly, we are, how worthy we are, and whether we have any things in common.”57 But who was confused? Who doubted whose worth? As E. Nelson Bridwell’s old Tonto joke in Mad magazine went, “What you mean ‘we,’ white man?” If Bloom had been clear about the entitlement and exclusivity of the (supposedly) civilized class, Bernstein had precisely captured the anxiety and agitation of the liberal elites. “Who Are We?” became the question of the moment.

  For the Fourth of July weekend in 1991, those words were emblazoned across Time magazine’s cover, over a Ruth Marten painting that updated Spirit of ’76, Archibald Willard’s famous 1875 painting of the Yankee Doodling fife-and-drum trio leading Revolutionary War patriots across the battlefield. Here in her revision the brown-vested, Washington-tressed white male drummer remained dead center. But now the other drummer was a kerchiefed conga-playing Black woman, the fife player a feather-wearing American Indian. A flag carrier in the rear appeared to be a Latino male, and an Asian woman followed.

  Before multiculturalism, Paul Beatty had suggested, “White wasn’t the textbook ‘mixture of radiations from the visible spectrum’; it was the opposite. White was the expulsion of colors encumbered by self-awareness and pigment.”58 Now multiculturalism had revealed a whiteness newly burdened by self-awareness. The identity crisis at hand was less one of American civilization than of American whiteness.

  In the riot-starting year of 1992, after his failed presidential run, Pat Buchanan stepped to the podium at the Republican National Convention to name the civil strife in American culture. “My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are,” he said. “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”

  He railed about “homosexual rights,” “radical feminism,” and “environmental extremism.” And he closed with a story, likely apocryphal, set in the ashes of the Los Angeles riots, whose endless televised stream of images of fire and chaos seemed to evoke antebellum nightmares of some vast colored people’s vengeance:

  Hours after the violence ended I visited the Army compound in south LA, where an officer of the 18th Cavalry, that had come to rescue the city, introduced me to two of his troopers. They could not have been twenty years old. He told them to recount their story.

  They had come into LA late on the second day, and they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage.59

  Multiculturalism was the fetish of elites gone soft before the mobs—all those spineless university, corporate, and civic leaders caving before demographic change. In belligerent speeches and writings, Buchanan echoed Bloom’s warning that the country was headed for a Weimar-style collapse. Only a proper show of force could stop it.

  There was a dizzying sweep to the time—the proliferating armies, the counterrevolutionary edge, the sudden turns for the worse, bellicosity thickening the air. It was a great time to be making art.

  Wee Pals Sunday strip, February 4, 1973. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.

  The Abyss by Kay WalkingStick. 1989. Acrylic, oil, and wax. Diptych of paintings. Courtesy June Kelly Gallery.

  CHAPTER 7

  UNITY AND RECONCILIATION

  THE ERA OF IDENTITY

  I see, you are seen; I desire, you satiate; I know, you are known; I rule, you are ruled. “You” are the Other.

  —Eunice Lipton, “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? Some Plots for a Dismantling”

  In a 1990 address, Modern Language Association president Catharine Stimpson argued multiculturalism offered “the necessary recognition that we cannot think of culture unless we think of many cultures at the same time.”1 It made little sense to think anymore of cultures as fixed and unchanging. That kind of thinking led to imperialist conceptions of identity that offered only a choice between civilization and barbarism. A prescripted life or a kind of death.

  In an influential 1985 essay, from an anthology he curated for a special issue of the literary journal Critical Inquiry on “Race, Writing and Difference,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. reminded readers race was a biological fiction, spoken in figures of speech. “Who has seen a black or red person, a white, yellow, or brown? These terms are arbitrary constructs, not reports of reality,” he wrote.

  Yet if an artist of color wanted to express the fullness of his humanity, he might still find himself bound by his difference. “We accepted a false premise by assuming that racism would be destroyed once white racists became convinced we were human, too,” Gates wrote. He retold the story of an early-twentieth-century Haitian writer named Edmond Laforest, who, “with inimitable, if fatal, flair for the grand gesture, stood upon a bridge, calmly tied a Larousse dictionary around his neck, then leapt to his death.”2

  But what of life? What other choice did an artist of color have but to try to make herself seen, make her story legible? People created, improvised their identity, often in stunning and hopeful ways. They sought commonality even as they asserted their uniqueness. Diversity and difference—not exclusion and domination—were the basic conditions of vital cultures.

  In the early 1990s, two books—Lucy Lippard’s Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, and an anthology issued from Marcia Tucker’s New Museum of Contemporary Art entitled Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures—captured a bright urgent optimism. Cornel West’s essay in the latter was received like a manifesto by a mass reaching criticality—both in numbers and theoretical sophistication. He wrote:

  I would go so far as to claim that a new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of difference.… Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogenous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing.3

  THE BIG IDEA

  And so in early 1989, the directors of three small museums in New York City began to talk about doing something that would be dizzying in its bigness, dazzling in its ambition: a joint exhibition that would capture the entire decade of the 1980s and frame the discussions for the art world of the 1990s, centered around the expansive, continuing project of identity itself.

  The idea had come from the beautiful mind of Marcia Tucker. In 1977, after eight years as the first hired woman curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tucker had left to form the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She wanted, she said years later, “to see what happens when you don’t look at everything through white, male eyes.”4 Now Tucker approached two friends, Nilda Peraza, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (MoCHA), and Kinshasha Holman Conwill, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the idea began taking shape.

  It would be named The Decade Show. The show would simply, Holman Conwill said, “Let the art talk.” A list of artists, breathtaking in its scale and diversity, would be hung at all three museums simultaneously. “What we really are doing, what we really need to pursue,” Peraza said, “is working towards the creation of a very generous and open art environment in this country, one that will allow and accept artists from all backgrounds, without
stereotyping and pigeonholing.”5

  In another time, the notion might have sounded bland, almost sentimental. But in the context of neocon attacks from the Beltway, a heated tug-of-war over the direction of the art world, and a social environment impacted by high-profile hate crimes, AIDS, and demands for truer representation, it sounded visionary.

  The beginnings of the The Decade Show lay in the foundational networks of alternative arts spaces that had developed in communities of color for the better part of a century. Artists of color had built local and regional ecosystems of art production—not just places to make art, but places to show, buy, and discuss the work.

  Take the arc of development for Asian American arts. In the early twentieth century, immigrant and second-generation artists mostly living on the West Coast like the painters Chiura Obata, Chang Shu-Chi, Hisako Hibi, Yun Gee, and Dong Kingman; the photographers Irene Poon, Hiromu Kira, and Toyo Miyatake; and the female proto–graphic novelist Miné Okubo had preceded even the term “Asian American.” But they had set up schools and organized themselves into groups like the Chinese Revolutionary Artists’ Club, where they mounted exhibitions and discussed how to create art that might avoid, as Gee put it, “Western appetites for orientalia.”6

  In the 1970s, nonprofit Asian American arts organization startups, including New York’s Basement Workshop, San Francisco’s Kearny Street Workshop, Los Angeles’s Visual Communications, and Boston’s Asian American Resource Workshop, gave a new generation places to explore the emerging notion of an Asian American identity.